The Design of a Monster

The Monster of Frankenstein at the intersection of early nineteenth-century Scientific Discourses.

In the preface of the third edition of Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, on the first page, Mary Shelley describes the impossible physical fact of her Monster as a form of licentiapoetica through which our imagination affords a more comprehensive and commanding point of view to delineate the human passions. The exception in what we conceive as possible becomes a literary vehicle to evoke a spectrum of possible affects. The unbaptized Monster is the result of a presumptive experimentation, extrapolated—not without some degree of philosophical sophistication—from the scientific endeavors that started to give shape to the Life Sciences of early 19th century. In this paper, we will treat the Monster as a discursive tissue of a much larger body of knowledge from which it is extracted, or put together as a bricolage of various and even contradictory scientific voices. The Monster demonstrates something, in the ancient notion of the word monstrum that we find in Seneca as “a visual and horrific revelation of truth” (Gregory A Staley, Seneca and the Idea of Tragedy, 113). We shall treat Shelley’s and Frankenstein’s shared creation as an artifact that is begotten at the convergence of three main discursive axes that hovered above the scientific community of London around the year 1816. His being an omnium-gatherum of different members could reflect an isomorphically patch-worked scientific discourse that might well give us a view of what went on Shelley’s mind that night of 1817. In parallel, we perceive literature, in this case science-fiction, as a way of canalizing incommensurable problematics under a common imaginative platform—in this case the contradictory body of Frankenstein’s invention. Finally, we shall see how Mary’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his philosophy—an amalgam of different monistic traditions—underwrites her project. His unconditional Necessitarianism could provide a conclusive catharsis for the Modern Prometheus from the guilt that was assigned to him as an unethical overreacher —that follows the demonization of his transgression— by distributing responsibility to an extended causal structure.

“The Villa Diodati” In: William Brockedon, Finden’s illustrations of the life and works of Lord Byron; with original and selected information on the subjects of the engravings. vol. II (London: John Murray, 1833).

During the famous Ghost-Story Contest, Mary happened to silently listen to Lord Byron and her husband Percy talking about and contemplating “. . .the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated” (Introduction, ix). She informs us, as Marilyn Butler outlines, that:

the conversation took in three contemporary scientific proposals to tackle the vitalist problem pragmatically or experimentally—one by Erasmus Darwin, presumably showing that single-cell parasites generate spontaneously, one by reanimating a corpse electrically, using a galvanic battery, and the third. . . the reconstruction of a body which would then also be reanimated (Butler 1993-2008, Introduction xxi).

In one of her insightful introductions Mary refers to famous a priori condition that had already pervaded most of western Metaphysical themes: ex nihilo nihil fit. The ex nihilo (OED: hilum, from greek, χυλός originally stood for “the umbilical cord”) refers to a condition where something appears to have no relation with anything. Stemming from the privation of hilum, the ni-hilo literally means without a trace of attachment from its primal cause. On that note, Mary makes an interesting remark on invention, and frames it as a modification of something already present, rather than a free act disconnected from a material cause:

Every thing must have a beginning. . . and the beginning must be linked to something that went before. . . Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos ; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself (Shelley 1831, Introduction: ix).

Invention here is framed as an active expression of latent qualities that are embedded in the source of the invention. That fits nicely with the Romantic conception of form as an expression of latent forces. Just as Mary refers to the imperative of a beginning, Erasmus Darwin as far back as in 1803 found in the spontaneous production of microorganisms and parasites a “primordium of life” (Darwin 1803, Additional notes, 7). According to his book The Temple of Nature, written as a philosophical poem, the chaosredivivum—a term that was used by Linnæus in his 12th edition of Systema Naturae (1767) for his last genus of the Regnum Animale, namely Chaos—is the name given to a threshold under which life spontaneously emerges. E. Darwin’s chaos—under the ancient meaning of the word χάος as gap or chasm—is the key to Shelley’s invention that attributes to her character that at first appears to be without any relation to nature, without any precedence. “Like Adam, I was created apparently united by no link to any other being in existence,” the monster cries (Shelley 1831, 112). And although the creature complains that it has no relation to any other being, it may be argued that the hilum of the monster is the darwinian chaos. From there, life arises spontaneously. The chaotic substratum underwrites both life and death, it precedes them in a way. This is how it invokes the alchemical notion of a prima materia that would supposedly yield the transition from one substance to the other. In the words of the alchemically-minded D. Frankenstein:

I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me—a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple. . . (Shelley 2008, 34)

However, if we pay attention to E. Darwin’s theory, although it happens that life can be created spontaneously as if in absence of a genealogical history, he proposes apart from the historical canal that ties organisms in hereditary relations, the somewhat “horizontal” recombination of parts as a mechanism of variation in microorganic life. We may even attempt to form the analogy that the Chaos Redivivum as an originary source is for any spontaneous synthesis, what the dead flesh is for the monster of Frankenstein. It is as if Doctor Frankenstein appears to reproduce or mimic on the level of anatomical recombination what happens at the level of chemical fermentations.

There is therefore no absurdity in believing that the most simple animals and vegetables may be produced by the congress of the parts of decomposing organic matter, without what can properly be termed generation, as the genus did not previously exist; which accounts for the endless varieties, as well as for the immense numbers of microscopic animals (Darwin 1803, Additional notes, 8).

Another view for this chemical ypokeimenon, is presented in a 1802 lecture of another influential scientist for the scientifically-minded Shelleys. Humphry Davy, just like Erasmus Darwin, focuses on the phenomena of composition and decomposition and views nature as a cyclical flow of chemical components, between entropy and order across the nourishment and growth of organized beings. Both scientist are looking for the ‘Principle of Life’ at the chemical order of nature.

Mary Shelley, Manuscript page from Frankenstein “Draft of Frankenstein (“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld my man completed …”)

Mary and Percy lived close to London at around 1816, when the big debate between religious-minded Vitalists and Mechanists took place. For the supporters of the latter thesis, such as W. Lawrence, any attempt to locate life—to find a locale of the life-principle impervious to the inquiries of hard science—is already predetermined to fail. Reductions to the chemical, mechanical phenomena and the forces that articulate the worlds that they appear can only perpetuate false notions about life. For Lawrence, Life is a incessant process of dissemination of the vital impulse conveyed in hereditary parent-child relations. And the term “vital impulse” here stands only for the continuation of being, with no allusion to a particular thing. Only Life brings about Life. In other words: life is contagious. The phenomena that appear at the level of the physiology of organized bodies are in no way analogous or reducible to the phenomena that chemistry or mechanical physics studies. Life cannot be imbued (a word that was currently used with vitalistic undertones) neither attributed, nor the result of self-organization. Life is just the name we give to a set of functions. It is therefore a matter of physiological expression and not a localized substance that could be abstracted and studied separately from matter.

Life is the assemblage of all the functions, and the general result of their exercise. Thus organization, vital properties, functions, and life are expressions related to each other; in which organization is the instrument, vital properties the acting power, function the mode of action, and life the result (Lawrence 1816, On Life, 120-121)

For Lawrence’s Monism Life cannot be an exception. It pertains strictly to a particular scale of traits and behaviors. John Abernethy, the main opponent and ex-professor of Lawrence reintroduces dualism by looking for a “a subtile invisible substance” (Abernethy, 1814, 39) to account for conscious life. Thus, scientific discourse points to a way in which Life is becoming another source to be exploited, another force for humans to tap into. Victor Frankestein, although he performs a strictly materialistic task, charges his creation with a version of the spiritualized mystifying electricity of Abernethy’s in order to short-circuit (or challenge) the Monistic approach and elicit the Spirit in a dead res extensa. The galvanism that was rejected from Lawrence as unable to yield scientific results, reanimates a pastiche of separate parts. “Perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth” (Shelley 2008 196, Appendix A). Shelley here might have been influenced by the vitalists’ quest for some “subtile, mobile, invisible substance” or fluid “analogous to electricity” that could account for the conscious states of the human being that positioned outside of the brute physical causality could command the “gross and inert nature” of other bodies (Abernethy 1814, 39). Perhaps in Abernethy’s spiritualized vitalism she finds an element of mythopoetic value. Electricity recapitulates the Promethean fire, that in turn symbolized the dissemination of knowledge and technique across the world, that the anthropic genus is equipped with. And, as the rest of the title suggests, it helps us identify Frankenstein with the familiar tragic figure of the Prometheus. At the same time, Shelley—committed to Lawrence’s view on Life—uses the life-enduing element as yet another material, found in plain 19th century electrical current, whose ever-broadening usage would ultimately demystify its analogy to souls.
Let us bring together what we have covered thus far: we have E. Darwin’s Chaos, acting as the hilus from inorganic to organic, from inanimate to animate; this in turn is projected to the field of physiology, the field in which the mechanistic thinking of Lawrence operates. The final touch of “vital warmth” is given by galvanism, possibly paying hommage to Abernethy’s vitalism (and possibly to forms of alchemical investigation derived from Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus among others). Thus, if in Erasmus we find a formulation of a prime matter as a medium of recombination, a non-genealogical, “horizontal” occurrence of Life, in Lawrence, Shelley finds a mechanistic and monistic conception of Life as an uninterrupted continuum that mediates through the parade of organized bodies over time. From him she may also chose to see life as an “assemblage of all functions” stressing the spiritual element of all mechanical processes. However, by introducing the somewhat abstracted force of electricity she departs from Mechanism and uses her monster as a flag for vitalistic beliefs. It becomes evident that the Monster—as a body of knowledge—is vacillating between two irreconcilable traditions. The life-enduing element that instigates Life for Abernethy as a super-added element is a totally unnatural justification for Lawrence.
The Monster then proves in its literary form the Unconscious origin of Conscious things. Or rather, how the unconscious14 and the conscious differ only in degree, and that the quality of Life cannot be found in something that evades rigorous mathematical quantification. Life, in the hands of Frankenstein is created as a mere transformation of Energy from physico-chemical charge to biological activity. Thus, the unnamed monster represents the stage that follows the passive investigation of the “principle of Life:” that of actively designing Life by tapping into the Necessary laws of organic and physico-chemical laws, that is the “stupendous mechanism of the Creator” (Shelley 1831: Introduction, x). The monster is an expression of the laws that govern the Natural world rather than of a Creator that stands outside of its creation, as a transient cause. Instead, for Shelley, the Creator’s fate is immanently tied with the fate of its creation, and most importantly: it cannot be separated from the effects that it caused. The Monster lacks any sort of life-sustaining purpose after his Creator’s death. The Creator in a self-reflective fashion realizes that his own life follows necessarily from his constitution just like the creation on his laboratory. Because the experiment is successful it signals a demystification of the phenomenon of life, and with it, it separates Frankenstein from his life-sustaining alchemical task.

By using the radical Necessitarianism of P. B. Shelley we can read the Monster as the crystallization of a variety of causal sources, in such a way that the responsibility of its wretchedness is distributed in all his encounters with the human species. If Frankenstein and his creation were to conceive themselves as parts of the same chain of events and agents in causal communication, they would place themselves in what P. B. Shelley apotheosized as an “immense and uninterrupted chain of causes and effects” (Shelley 1847, 24 [notes on "Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem”]) of the moral and material universe. If by means of P. B. Shelley’s doctrine, Creator and Creation, could look at themselves, one as the cause of the other, that would bring a long anticipated—but long gone—chance of relieving the problematic relation between them. If the Monster could be seen as a necessary consequence that follows from the body of scientific discourse that had been accumulating, it would dispel the apocalyptic atmosphere that torments their lives. So we find an indisposition of the one to trace the motives of the other.
Thus we may infer that the problem of Mary Shelley’s is somehow answered in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s essay.

Bibliography:

Abernethy, John. An enquiry into the probability and rationality of Mr. Hunter’s theory of life; being the subject of the first two . . . the Royal College of Surgeons, of London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown,1814.

Darwin, Erasmus. The Temple of Nature; or the Origin of Society; a poem, with philosophical notes. London: J. Johnson, 1803.

Lawrence, William FRS. An introduction to the comparative anatomy and physiology, being the two introductory lectures delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons on the 21st and 25th of March 1816. London: J. Callow, 1816.

Butler, Marilyn “Introduction” in Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, the 1818 text, ix-1i. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2008.

Michail Vlasopoulos is an architect from Greece. He currently studies in Harvard GSD as an MdesS candidate in History and Philosophy of Design. His contribution to Abitare will be a Logbook about ideas, events, and discourse at the GSD and in the context of the larger design world.

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16 November 2018

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